terrific action of unfathomed nature

From my reading couple of weeks ago:

[Boldwood] had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all. He saw no absurd sides to the follies of life, and thus, though not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men and scoffers, and those to whom all things show life as a jest, he was not intolerable to the earnest and those acquainted with grief. Being a man who read all the dramas of life seriously, if he failed to please when they were comedies, there was no frivolous treatment to reproach him for when they chanced to end tragically.

Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.

I finished Far From the Madding Crowd Sunday. Spoiler alert: Mr. Boldwood's "wild capabilities" surface.  He murders Sgt. Troy at the book's climax, and uses the insanity defense to win a life sentence.  Wasn't expecting the insanity defense.

The book ends, rapidly, just pages later, with our long-suffering, dutiful hero, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene marrying.

In the afterword, James Wright paraphrases Yvor Winters that "the language of Hardy's novels is often most beautiful when it is most like the language of his poems."

Then Wright quotes D.H.Lawrence: the "quality which Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself..."  Through Oak's "wise passiveness, the sorrows of Bathsheba are given their shape."

Like Oak, I want my protagonist to be both part of the "small action" as well as the "terrific action of unfathomed nature," and like Gabriel and Bathsheba, act morally in the face of the uncomprehended and incomprehensible.

Hardy's characters don't develop so much as mature, age in the face of new circumstances.  They stay true to their personality.  In my memoir I don't think any characters change.  I'd been viewing this as a failure of the narrative--its dramatic arc.  I'm more at peace with the revision process now.  I've finished the rewrites of Aug/Sept/October--at least this pass.

World of Fire. World of Original Experience.

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.” 
― Joseph Campbell

"Enter the forest at the darkest point."

"You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations."

Today I'm re-writing October 5th and my mood is sinking.  Because of technical problems and self-doubt about my craft and the story (replaying conversations with my old boss, my new boss and Grace in narration--should I break the scene apart?) but also the hero's path.  October 5th is a dark entry point, but is my memoir the right forest?  Using Campbell's word "bliss," which strikes me as ridiculous, if I finish this rewrite will I find bliss?  Or does this path lead to misery.  After I spend and hour or two on it, I'm reliably depressed.

I guess the analogy is false.  The book is the dark path.  The forest is life.  I can choose another path but not another life.

3 of 23 Pound Poetry Don'ts

Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)

in Poetry | January 30th, 2014

4. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

13. When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

18. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure...

Curated by: Open Culture

I've had a short holiday from my book.  Resumed yesterday.  The break makes it clear, that in addition to the standard writerly insecurities, the subject matter brings me down.

Hamlet or Macbeth

Butcher's Chapter 9:  Plot and Character.

The emotions must harden into will and the will express itself in deed.

Hamlet: Events are then brought about, not by the free energy of will, but by acts of arrested volition, by forces such as operate in the world of dreamland.

Macbeth: strong, dominant, militant frame of mind.  Nothing is more wonderful than the resistless impulse, the magnificent energy of will with which a Macbeth or Richard III goes to meet his doom.

The fate that overtakes the hero is no alien thing, but his own self recoiling upon him for good or evil.

I'm pro reality, because lack of reality killed Jack.  That puts me clearly on the side of Reason.  My Reason failed to protect Jack, but that is secondary.  Primary, her irrationality, killed Jack.

The test of a man's sanity is the relation in which his mind stands to the universal.  Denise's action defied the universal.

Do I sound like Hamlet?

the end is the thing

Karr's art of Memoir

I don’t try to reconstruct empty spots. I’ve been vigorously encouraged by various editors to fictionalize. They would say, It must have been a very dramatic scene, saying goodbye to your mother. And I remember reading that Vivian Gornick said to her students, “Just make it up and see if it’s true.” Bullshit. In fiction, you manufacture events to fit a concept or an idea. With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept. You don’t remember something? Write fiction.

It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction. If you see the memoir as constructing a false self to sell to some chump audience, then you’ll never know the truth, because the truth is derived from what actually happened. Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.

Today I just couldn't get going.  I was in a muddle about verb tenses: my book goes in and out of past and present, even inside a paragraph.  It felt lazy to me.  One model novel, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, is most mostly present, but has past in there.  But always in a discrete paragraph or fragment.

My friends David & Christine bumped into me in the Ballard library.  I confessed my struggle on tenses.  Since David had mentioned Karr and Liar's Club, I went to the shelves, picked up Lit, and skimmed a lot of tense changes by Karr.  Mostly past.  Like mine.  But present came flooding in for whole chapters.  So use the verb tense the story demands.

Autobiography is mostly contingent on voice. If the voice is strong enough, the reader will go anywhere with you. And who’s better at syntax and diction than a poet?

So back home, google, and this Paris Review interview of Karr in 2009.

 Prose always seems inadequate to me because every line isn’t a jewel. But it can’t be. Prose favors information; poetry favors music and form.

The memoir’s antagonist has to be some part of the self, and the self has to be different at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. Otherwise you have what I call the sound-bite memoir or the ass-whipping memoir. 

On Neiman Storyboard:

That suggests that you are supposed to give the [Reader] something: an experience – that distilled experience.

Interviewed by Dean Nelson in 2011, around minute 8:20, Karr says she doesn't write for herself--not "what is important to me."  My whole memoir is what is important to me.  Hmmm.  Should I say fuck it, shred the thing?

At minute 9:50, a memoirist has events, and you don't know the truth of those events, so you manufacture meaning from those events.

At minute 15, the truth has to ambush you.  Is this example, the events are Karr leaving for California.  Her own life narrative had been that her dad left her.  She had to scratch at the story, the events, to find the truth--that she left him not that he left her.  So how would that apply to my story?  What myth have I created, that through the writing of this memoir, I'll find the truth behind?  I really resist the pithy answers.  I don't trust "finding the truth."  I think it is just a new narrative--one that replaces another.  But as I do this rewrite, I am trying to open my mind.

She Died of the Fifth Act

I added more content today; about Brown and my daughter.  I hope soon I can start pruning, so the story won't be too vast to be grasped by the mind.

Butcher, in Chapter 7, says Unity for Aristotle is the principle of limits.  Without Unity, my action would be undefined, indeterminate, accidental to The Reader.  Uh huh.

Amusing quote regarding the history of the stage:  "What did she die of?" was asked concerning one of the characters of a bad tragedy.  "Of what? of the fifth act!"

I think my entire book is Falling Action.  I don't have a denouement where all minor effects are subordinated to the sense of an ever-growing unity.

The epic is a story of the past; a drama, the present.

In Greek tragedy, the tragic hero often fights against destiny; in my book, I fight against something equally rational: psychosis.  Temporary psychosis.

The hero:  character is destiny.

full circle today

I wrote myself full circle.  Around 11 I panicked.  I found new content that was evocative, and that I had to find a way to add that to the draft.  The material was heavy (which already brings me down), but the idea that my draft was expanding was disheartening.  It's already too long.  Each thing I add makes the final edit harder.  And there was the fear of more landmines out there to trip over.

I took a break.  Showered.  Ate lunch.  I found a way to constructively attack the new content.

And then, about 3/4 of the way through the new content, I realized that what I was working on was from November 2007--not November 2006.

Yes I wasted some time, but the good news is that today's wild goose chase validates not just my composition process but also how I'm approaching this revision.